Town Musician

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Newt The Reptilian

How far removed from reality are the elected few? How can we even tell who they are? For all I know they are pre-programmed to spit out their talking points without thinking that maybe there are real people out there. I had not thought about it before, but that a man named Newt might have a reptilian mind is plausible. He seems to think that unemployment compensation is the same as welfare. First of all the amount of money a person gets from "welfare" is not enough to allow you to fare very well.

But the Newt didn't really mean welfare. He really meant unemployment compensation, something that every working American pays for. Does Newt, the reptilian, mean that the mortgage should be abandoned? Does he think the unemployed should move back in with the parents?

He seems to think that it is fun to draw unemployment. He seems to think it is fun to worry about mortgage payments. A person who loses his house because he defaults, will still have to pay rent, and that rent nowadays is similar to what the mortgage would be.

In postwar Germany (1946-1948), I understood what it was like to be hungry and cold. The whole family went mushroom hunting in the woods for a meal. When there was nothing, we were still able to find food on the side of the road such as young stinging nettles. They taste like spinach, or blackberries. Some people cut down linden trees for wood to heat a small room in the kitchen in the dead of winter. My grandfather made sure that didn't happen in our street because he kept bees that made honey from the blossoms. That was the trade-off. Either you were warm for a few days or you had food to share with others. People knew what it was like to have nothing to eat. They knew how cold it can get without fuel to make a fire.

Now how about the reptilian mind? Does he know what the difference is between a toadstool and a chanterelle? Has he ever tried to do what we did? We gathered beechnuts and chestnuts in the woods, and the time we spent on gathering was a necessity. The reptilian mind might be in for a surprise when he does not know the difference between an amanita and a common field mushroom. They are not that different in the way they look.